Have you ever realized how difficult it is to live in the here and now? By that I mean it doesn’t seem natural to be able to simply be aware that you are alive, breathing and thinking and speaking and eating and drinking right now. We don’t live in the yesterdays of our lives. They are gone, never to return. If we have regret about past mistakes or bad decisions, we can’t take a trip backward into time and change those decisions that eventually lead us to wring our hands about things done or left done. They’re over. They’re gone. We may have memories but we don’t have power to change those decisions or actions. Some of us, including me, can spend our time trying to go back, but to no avail. Indeed when we spend our time trying to do so, we become familiar with an experience that often makes those memories worse: deep regret. Regret is a wasted emotion because all it does is gets us stuck in a very real sense of powerlessness.
I don’t mean to suggest that we should simply deny those experiences or decisions. Experience is a rich teacher and without reflection on poor decisions or actions, we lose all opportunities to grow closer to God and to become a more authentic self.
But sometimes a sense of regret can become so powerfully present that we move beyond experience being a teacher to a place of almost paralysis. Regret, for me, can become an overriding emotion that I literally become stuck in a past that can keep me from truly living and growing and changing.
As I was writing this sermon, my mind and heart went back to many things that I regret. Things I said, that I even taught and preached that hurt people. Without bleeding all over you, I remembered an old girl friend that I deeply hurt once, a long time ago. She was the last girl friend I had; in fact she stopped being my girlfriend after I met Julie. I remember falling in love with Julie and she was all I could think about. The problem was that I forgot to let my girlfriend know that I was moving on. I was moving on without her because I had fallen in love with another, Julie. How does one do that? If we had cell phones back then with the ability to text, I hate to admit it but I would have probably texted her rather than face the pain of an authentic and important face-to-face conversation. I’m grateful that I have changed and would never handle any difficult conversation that way, but I was young and inexperienced. I took to the easy route and just didn’t communicate for weeks. When I finally made the decision to go and talk to her, telling her that our relationship was over, it was weeks later. And it didn’t go well. There were tears and a lot of anger. So much so that I hid that experience deep in my heart.
Years went by and there was a lot of change that I experienced during those years. But somehow, the pain of how I poorly handled the end of that relationship had turned to regret. I didn’t regret falling in love or having children with Julie. I regretted hurting someone so deeply because of an unwillingness to have a difficult conversation. We had moved from the area where those events had unfolded but I had been called to a church in the same community. We moved back and I couldn’t stop thinking about trying to find a way to at least apologize for having mishandled this relationship. The regret became so intense that I finally found that she was living in Kansas City and I even got her phone number. Nervously one day, as I was headed to Kansas City to visit someone in the hospital, I mustered enough courage to pick up my phone and call her. I wanted to ask for forgiveness in order to park the regret that had become so powerful in my heart. And so nervously, I dialed her number. I had fantasized that this regret would evaporate like a small puddle after a summer rain. It would go away and I could go on with life, feeling better and losing the regret.
She picked up the phone and I recognized her voice, even after over twenty years. And she recognized mine. I cheerfully asked if this was her, if she remembered me and… all I heard was a declarative statement: “Oh my god,” she said and then hung up on me. Immediately I realized that she had never forgiven me. She still harbored the pain from the way I handled the end of our relationship and there was nothing I could do about it.
Regret. I was powerless to do anything about it. Was I simply going to have to learn how to live with that? Would regret simply be a companion as I continued on my journey?
If regret was all that kept me from living in the here and now, perhaps I could have made accommodations and attempted to move forward. But not unlike all of us, regret has an ugly companion that accompanies it. We all know this and despite its commonality, we all struggle with it. It’s called fear of the future.
I do this all the time. With help of others, I came to realize that fear of the future is something I use to sabotage joy in my life. It’s one of the most bizarre things that I have learned about myself. Almost like clockwork, when I begin to feel joy, I don’t feel as if I deserve it, and so I begin to worry about things that might go wrong. No one can read the tea leaves and know what tomorrow might bring any assumption that it will be something bad is a rather horrible thing to do. I say this to Julie all the time (but I am really saying it to myself): if we don’t know what tomorrow brings, and we are only left with assumptions, why don’t we pick a positive one? Again, I’m not saying planning is bad or it isn’t important to make healthy decisions about what eat or drink or whether or not we exercise. But what I am saying that assuming only bad things will happen in the future is an awful way to live. Like regret, it keeps us stuck from truly living.
This is what today means. We start our Lenten journey today, not in order to drop bad habits or develop a few good ones. Lent isn’t about who can be on top of a competitive group of people, trying to fast more than others or see who can have that ashen cross remain on our foreheads all day long. No, there is something more profound to find.
Lent is about learning to live in the here and now because we are dust and to dust shall we return. Lent is about learning how to let go of regret so its power on our hearts will disappear, even though we cannot take action to correct the way we have hurt people. Lent is about stopping our fear of the future because the only thing we really know about tomorrow is that God will never abandon us and ultimately, when you strip everything away, that is the only good news that will help us face whatever may come our way.
I will soon commend you to a Holy Lent. I want to offer you a slightly different way to approach that this year. I suggest to you today that when we remember we are dust and to dust shall we return, is a reminder that we came from God and can never fall out of God’s hands. This is a season that if we take the time, we can learn to live in the here and now, where Jesus says the Kingdom exists and let go of all that which keeps us from truly living. And let me give you a Lenten discipline that can help you with this: practice gratitude. Through prayer, fasting, and reflecting on God’s word, practice being thankful. And here is a song to put in your heart that will help:
If you find yourself half naked
and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,
again, the earth’s great, sonorous moan that says
you are the air of the now and gone, that says
all you love will turn to dust,
and will meet you there, do not
raise your fist. Do not raise
your small voice against it. And do not
take cover. Instead, curl your toes
into the grass, watch the cloud
ascending from your lips. Walk
through the garden’s dormant splendor.
Say only, thank you.
Thank you.
— Ross Gay “THANK YOU”